This proposal seeks continued funding for studies of application of vibrational optical activity techniques to biologically interesting molecules. We plan to develop consistent empirical descriptions of the relationship between structure and spectra for several biopolymeric systems. The main thrust will be development of understanding of oligopeptide conformations via VCD (vibrational circular dichroism). This data will be most relevant to protein structure and an extensive effort to correlate such data to globular protein VCD will be attempted. Other applications will include membrane proteins and oligopeptide drugs. Our development of techniques and polypeptide spectra-structure relationships is reviewed in the proposal. Similar efforts will be undertaken to develop systematic understanding of polynucleotide VCD for subsequent studies of detailed environmental effects on nucleic acid conformations. Application to biochemically relevant systems will require use of aqueous environments with a consequent loss of signal-to-noise ratio. To overcome this we will add FT-IR VCD capability to our laboratory which will additionally enable a more intensive effort to be devoted to these problems.